Natural language processing is a computer program’s ability to understand human speech as it is spoken or written. NLP is a component of artificial intelligence. Athena is BirdEye’s NLP engine. It’s used to understand what customers say about businesses.

So how can a business benefit from Athena’s NLP insights? Here are just a few ways:

Dive beneath star ratings from reviews

Whether a business has an average rating of 5 stars or 2, it needs to understand why in order to prevent those ratings from dropping. With Athena, a hotel can learn that dirty rooms in their San Jose location are dragging their overall ratings down by reading all reviews or social media content. Management can call that location and develop a strategy to fix this problem.

Take Customer Surveys and NPS to the next level

Traditional Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys ask customers how likely they are to recommend a business. This question doesn’t tell everything about the experience a customer actually had. What’s more, these surveys are often sent too late after a transaction — by the time a low score comes in, the damage has already been done.

Not only does BirdEye let businesses create their own real-time surveys; BirdEye’s Athena also identifies trending positive and negative topics in survey responses. With these real-time insights, businesses can pinpoint issues instantly and turn poor experiences into great ones.

Keep pace with social media

Customers can’t put star ratings in a tweet, but their comments can still pack a punch. Athena makes sense of all social mentions from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube – in real time. Businesses can easily discover frequent topics appearing in all the scattered chatter or be immediately notified immediately about relevant customers conversations.

Know competitors’ customers. Better than they do.

The only way to become an industry leader is by knowing the competition inside and out. Competitors’ customers are most likely prospects. With Athena, a business can get a deep level of insight into competitors’ customer feedback. This allows the most valuable comparison of strengths and weaknesses at both an enterprise and store level.

Athena was designed to help businesses find problems, fix them instantly, and stay connected with every customer in real-time. To earn a strong reputation and get more customers, businesses must make sure every customer is happy, every second. They need to not only be on the same page as their customers — they need to be on the same sentence. This is how a business can use Natural Language Processing to turn customers into a marketing engine.

About BirdEye

With BirdEye, it’s easier than ever to get new authentic customer reviews, building trust that leads to more sales. In today’s reputation economy, BirdEye provides the eyes, ears and algorithms necessary to create the five-star customer experiences that keep your business at the top.